Here are three recent stories of contamination at weapons and research facilities:
Tom Bailie grew up on a dryland farm in Mesa, Washington, just downwind from the massive Hanford plant founded in 1943 to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Bailie often served as an informal spokesman for the ‘downwinders’, the people who believed they were poisoned by fission products that flowed from the plant on air currents, along underground aquifers, and down the Columbia River on the dry plains of eastern Washington...
‘I finally realised,’ Bailie announced on another day, ‘why me and my buddies are still going strong, and the goodie-two-shoes we went to school with are sick or dead.’
‘Why, Tom?’
‘Because when their mothers told them to eat their vegetables and drink their milk, they did! Meanwhile, me and my friends snuck off to the store and bought Twinkies and Coke.’ Aeon
Half a century after America's first partial nuclear meltdown, hundreds of radioactive hot spots remain at a former research facility overlooking the west San Fernando Valley, according to a recently released federal study.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's $41-million survey of the facility, now owned by Boeing Co. and NASA, is expected to provide a precise map for state and federal agencies hoping to clean up the site by 2017.
It also sets the stage for determining a final disposition for the 2,850-acre site, which is home to rare plants, great horned owls and four-point bucks.
That won't be easy. Environmentalists and Boeing officials are already clashing over plans to transform the site near the Santa Susana Mountains into public open space. Los Angeles Times
Radioactive pollution is getting worse on parts of South Carolina’s nuclear-waste dump near Barnwell, but state regulators say cleaning up the contaminated groundwater isn’t in their plan.
Tritium continues to exceed federal safe drinking-water standards in and around the 41-year-old burial ground that has come to symbolize South Carolina’s historic willingness to accept the nation’s garbage. In some spots tritium levels are higher today than they were five years ago. The State